Katie Couric has some concerns about the way people are using technology. It’s “making us less reliant on true human connection,” the legendary news anchor told TechCrunch during the “South by Southwest” festival ...

You can now pay IKEA to help you put together its confusing furniture. The company announced this morning it’s rolling out the new TaskRabbit At-Home Assembly service in select U.S. markets where TaskRabbit is available, and in six...

Here’s another tidbit from Eddy Cue’s content-packed SXSW appearance yesterday. Along with a dive into Apple’s video content strategy, the company’s SVP offered up some insight into the health of its music streaming...

Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower who gave diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks, took the stage at SXSW this morning to talk about what life has been like for her post-prison, the current...

YouTube’s mobile app is getting a dark mode. The company announced this morning its dark theme first introduced on its desktop site last year, is launching today on the YouTube iOS app and arriving soon after on Android. With the setting ...

Sometimes the best features come when tech companies let their programmers and designers play around a bit. That's certainly the case with YouTube's "Dark theme," which arrives today on the iOS version of the app. (The darker...

YouTube is adding a new dark theme to its mobile apps, starting with iOS today. To activate the new theme, simply tap the account icon, go to settings, select “dark theme,” and enjoy the new look.
YouTube previously added a dark mode to its...

Hulu outbid major players in cable and streaming to obtain the rights to develop “Little Fires Everywhere,” a new limited series produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, producer of the Emmy-winning “Big Little...

I’m sure someone, somewhere out there was holding out on purchasing Amazon’s most premium Kindle reader because it wasn’t quite fancy enough for their taste. Perhaps this little garish addition will help push them over the...

The Kindle Oasis is a conspicuous display of wealth by its very nature (you have money to burn if you can spend $250 on an e-reader in 2018), but apparently Amazon didn't think it was ostentatious enough. The internet giant is taking US...

Five months after launch, Amazon is introducing a second color option for the Kindle Oasis: champagne gold. The e-reader still has a dark gray trim on the front, meant to make the text pop, but the back of the device is covered in a pale gold...

Automaker General Motors is said to be planning a new peer-to-peer car rental service, similar to existing offerings by Daimler-backed Turo and startup Getaround, to debut as early as this summer according to Bloomberg. The service will debut...

APIs — lightweight interfaces that both let developers integrate third-party services into their own apps, and let their apps get used more easily by other developers — have become an essential, and fast-growing, building block of...

Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket, the reusable launch vehicle created by Blue Origin to put people and large cargo into orbit, has a new confirmed payload for one of its first missions: mu Space. The Thai satellite startup announced it would ...

Almost everybody wants better skin, but not everyone wants to put in all the heavy lifting required. But DearBrightly, a Y Combinator-backed company, wants to simplify the process of making Rx retinoids accessible to everyone. Retonoid is an...

The acting head of NASA is stepping down on April 30. Robert M. Lightfoot Jr. told the space agency on Monday in an email where he says its with “bittersweet feelings” he’s going to retire after 28 years at NASA. A clear...

Rex Tillerson’s departure isn’t the only example of White House turnover this week. Acting NASA chief Robert M. Lightfoot Jr. just announced that he’s retiring on April 30, leaving no clear successor. Though President Trump...

Robert M. Lightfoot Jr. has been heading NASA's efforts ever since the previous administrator, Charles F. Bolden Jr., stepped down with President Obama. Since he never officially became Bolden's replacement -- he was acting administrator...

Volkswagen confirmed at its annual media conference that it’s going to bring one of its most eccentric concepts to production – the all-electric Sedric shuttle, which is more tiny pod bus than car, will eventually actually get...

As more computing moves to the edge, programmers are looking for ways to access computing power as close to their users as possible to reduce latency and increase performance. Today, Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Workers, a service that...

Harman and Samsung have entered into a strategic association that will have Harman taking up the SmartThings’ standard and carrying it forward against other Internet of Things products. Announced today, Samsung SmartThings R&D team...

The Ace was inevitable. Sure, Fitbit is leaning into smartwatches with today’s launch of the Versa, but the company’s current line of fitness trackers left a key demographic unserved. The new wearable, which is essential a scaled...

When Fitbit said it was working on a "family" of devices for this year, it really wasn't kidding. While Mom and Dad might choose to strap on a Versa, Fitbit now has a fitness tracker -- the Fitbit Ace -- meant exclusively for wee ones.

Fitbit is targeting a new kind of customer, one that probably isn’t even old enough to have a gym membership.
The new Fitbit Ace is a fitness tracker meant for children eight and older. Since kids aren’t likely to be setting fitness...

Fitbit is introducing its first fitness band dedicated for kids ages eight and up. The Fitbit Ace is basically an adapted version of the Fitbit Alta, with a smaller, adjustable band to fit tinier wrists and a revised software to remove data that may ...

Fitbit’s first smartwatch had its fair share of issues, including a large size, which made it unwieldy for many wrists. That fact no doubt automatically excluded the product from a big chunk of its potential user base, including a lot of ...

The Versa appears to be the Ionic’s smarter and better-looking younger brother.
When Fitbit CEO Jason Park walked out onto the stage at a launch event for media on Monday, I’ll confess I thought he was wearing an Apple Watch. He...

Fitbit's first true smartwatch, the Ionic, was an impressive attempt that lacked the polish needed to make it great. That's often how it goes for first attempts, but Fitbit has learned a few key lessons and is trying to crack the...

When Fitbit launched its first "real" smartwatch, the Ionic, last fall, its target customer was clear. Between the many sensors, Fitbit Coach software, and (literally) edgy design, you could tell the Ionic was made for athletes — or at least...

Fitbit’s first “real” smartwatch, the Fitbit Ionic, didn’t sell as well as the company had hoped, but that isn’t stopping it from releasing yet another smartwatch. The new Fitbit Versa ditches Ionic’s severe-looking, hard-edged design...

Fitbit’s new smartwatch Versa isn’t being overtly marketed at women. Doing that might alienate its male customers, who currently make up more than half of Fitbit’s user base. But today’s Versa launch coincides with plans for a new app...

Half a year after launching the Ionic, Fitbit is back with Versa, a “smartwatch for all.” The new wearable builds atop the same foundation as its predecessor, but offers a lower price point and a smaller frame, addressing two of...

The sentiment is punctuated by the fact that the product felt like a Hail Mary at the time. As Fitbit’s fortune was declining, the executive began talking up the product well in advance of its release, as the company acquired several...

When you think of cloud computing, chances are you are thinking about massive server farms that let you edit documents in the cloud and update your CRM system, but thankfully, there’s a playful side to the cloud as well. All of those...

Kitty Hawk, the company led by the ‘godfather of self-driving cars’ Sebastian Thrun and backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, has revealed its Cora aircraft, which is a hybrid vertical take-off and landing design that can take...

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is set to announce a new agreement with a company financed by Google co-Founder Larry Page to test autonomous air taxis for official certification in the country, reports The New York Times. Kitty Hawk, the...

The flying car company led by Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun and backed by Google co-founder Larry Page is breaking cover with a new deal that will see it test its autonomous electric air taxis with the New Zealand government, with the aim of...

Google cofounder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page has revealed Cora, the first flying car to come out of Kitty Hawk, a startup Page invested in in 2016, reports CNBC. Cora is fully autonomous and can travel at a speed up to 93 mph. It’s...

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.
We have more news from SXSW, including a quick recap of Elon Musk's sold-out talk. Elsewhere, Larry Page showed off an autonomous flying machine that could be the backbone of Uber-in-the-sky and Philips is ...

Reports surfaced in 2016 that Google co-founder (and now Alphabet CEO) Larry Page had two "flying car" projects in the works, and while we saw the Flyer recreational vehicle unveiled last year, today it's time to meet Cora. An...

In April last year, Google co-founder Larry Page publicly announced he was building an electric, flying car through a company called Kitty Hawk. A video showed a prototype aircraft flying over water, but it was unclear when it would be approved by...

Filed under:
Design/Style,New York Auto Show,Toyota,Crossover,SUV
All we have is spy photos and a teaser image.Continue reading 2019 Toyota Rav4 to debut at New York International Auto Show
2019 Toyota Rav4 to debut at New...

Automaker Volkswagen’s ramping up for its big EV push, with $25 billion in committed battery supplies and plans to outfit 16 factories to build electric cars by the end of 2022, up from three with that capacity in the VW stable right...

Filed under:
Green,Plants/Manufacturing,Volkswagen,Emerging Technologies,Technology
'We have pulled out all the stops' in the move to electric vehiclesContinue reading Volkswagen assigns $24 billion in battery orders to speed EV...

Tandem, the U.K. challenger bank co-founded by fintech veteran Ricky Knox, continues to be a shopping spree. Following the purchase of Harrods Bank, the banking arm of the famous luxury British department store, the company is acquiring...

WeWork — the co-working startup valued at $20 billion with some 200,000 members across 200 locations globally — is continuing with its strategy of expanding into a wide array of adjacent operations to grow its business. Today the...

Payments company Ripple says it plans to invest in startups and technology companies to develop more uses for XRP, its cryptocurrency that is currently the third largest digital token behind bitcoin and Ethereum based on total market cap. The ...

Danish startup Artland has closed $1M in seed funding for a social art marketplace app that aims to connect galleries and professional buyers. It’s also hoping to attract newcomers with an appetite to buy art but who don’t...

Shares of Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding, an international investment company controlled by Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, soared in January when he was freed after two months of being held captive at a Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, Saudi...

Ride-hailing service Grab is being heavily linked with a deal to buy out Uber’s business in Southeast Asia, but those rumors aren’t stopping it from building its fintech platform after announced a financial services unit. The...

Beijing-based bike-sharing startup Ofo has raised $866 million in new financing led by Alibaba Group to fuel its expensive competition with Mobike, which is backed by Tencent, one of Alibaba’s biggest rivals. Ofo and Mobike are the two...

The massive haul is the largest investment in a single funding round for a bike-sharing startup, reports CNBC. The funding round was led by Chinese internet giant Alibaba. Ofo says it currently has 200 million users around the world and operates in...

Salesforce is set to buy CloudCraze, an enterprise e-commerce solution built on its cloud-based customer relationship management platform. Based in Chicago, CloudCraze announced on its site that it’s signed a definitive agreement to be...

After getting delayed by at least a month or so following a regulatory investigation just days before the meeting was scheduled to take place, Qualcomm’s timetable to hold the meeting is now bumped up to ten days from now — and...

Donald Trump just put his presidential foot down, and made serious waves in the world of tech in the process.
However, instead of declaring his latest whim via Twitter, the 45th president of the United States turned Monday afternoon to...

Enlarge / U.S. President Donald Trump hugs Broadcom CEO Hock Tan as Tan announces the repatriation of his company's headquarters to the United States from Singapore during a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House on November 2, 2017 in...

This weekend, I published a comprehensive overview of the epic hundred-billion-dollar Qualcomm vs. Broadcom merger battle that has taken place over the past few weeks. In that post, I concluded that “… the Trump administration is going ...

Broadcom’s dream of dominating the mobile chip business by taking over Qualcomm is apparently dead. The White House issued a statement late on Monday: “The proposed takeover of Qualcomm by the Purchaser is prohibited, and any...

President Trump has blocked Broadcom’s proposed buyout of Qualcomm, due to security concerns, according to a report on CNBC. The combination of the two chipmakers would have potentially been the biggest tech merger ever. New: Full Text...

Broadcom's hopes of acquiring Qualcomm might have been quashed for good. President Trump has issued an order blocking Broadcom's proposed takeover and anything "substantially equivalent" to it over concerns that it might...

President Donald Trump issued an order Monday evening blocking any merger of the chipmaking giants Broadcom and Qualcomm, saying it was necessary to protect national security. Broadcom’s control over Qualcomm, the order says, might allow the...

The massive fight over the fate of Qualcomm, which chipmaker Broadcom seeks to acquire in the largest deal in technology effort, took another dramatic turn this afternoon when the Trump administration said it would block the deal. The move is...

Today, Toshiba showed off an AR headset for the enterprise world called the dynaEdge. The unsexy headset is pretty unremarkable in most regards, what distinguishes it is the fact that there’s actually a full-blown Windows 10 Professional ...

XPrize announced today that it’s teaming up with Japanese airline All Nippon Airways on a new $10 million competition. XPrize founder and chairman Peter Diamandis said the ANA team was interested in an XPrize around “reinventing...

In a rare moment of contrition, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe admitted misleading both consumers and advertising execs with statements last week that the company tracks the location of users before and after they go to the movies. “We...

A week after MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe's comments that "we watch how you drive home" came to light, the exec is walking back those words. In an interview with Variety, Lowe said "I said something completely inaccurate as far as...

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe told TechCrunch that he actually mischaracterized MoviePass’s collection of location data last week at the Entertainment Finance Forum in Los Angeles. During his keynote at the conference, Lowe said: “We get an ...

Out in the desolate wastes of deepest Iceland, magic blooms. The Icelandic sagas tell of fairy houses to magical rings that control the world and now one of those, the Wave, has landed on the Internet. The Wave is a ring that controls sound....

Paul Vigna, along with his writing partner Michael Casey, are crypto gurus. A crypto critic and Wall Street Journal reporter, Vigna sees through the hype and looks for the value inherent in the crypto system. Vigna and I spoke during this, the ...

Spotify announced today the launch of a new tool called Line-In that will allow its community members to offer input about the music data it has on file, like genre, mood, explicitness, and more. The goal is to leverage the wisdom of the...

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration over its alleged practices of searching the electronic devices of passengers traveling...

Stitch Fix, the on-demand fashion styling business, saw its shares quickly fall 6% following the bell on Monday, after missing earnings projections for its second-quarter release. The company posted an adjusted earnings per share of two...

After leading by example for quite a while, Snap is going to start putting AR lenses built by third-party creators front-and-center in the Snapchat app. The move, first reported by Mashable, will bring creator content to the main stage. While...

Lyft made a lot of progress in 2017, helped by strong market expansion within the U.S., and riding some very bad news from its primary rival Uber. That’s helped it grow revenue to over $1 billion as measured by GAAP standards for its...

With TV programming now spread out across a variety of services beyond traditional network TV, it can be hard to know what to watch next and what’s popular, given how much great content there is to choose from. An app called TV Time is...

Most paleo dieters try to stick to some type of regimen similar to what they think our distant, pre-agricultural ancestors might’ve eaten. Few, however, talk about eating literally what those ancestors ate. Yet for Geltor, a Silicon...

Apple has more original content news: It picked up two seasons of a new musical animated comedy from Loren Bouchard, the creator of Bob’s Burgers. The series is called Central Park, and is co-written by Josh Gad and Nora Smith in...

Apple has been moving pretty aggressively into the entertainment business lately. With a reported $1 billion budget for original programming, the tech company can afford to acquire high-value projects like the Kevin Durant childhood drama, a...

Earlier this year we reported that Twilio was going to launch a full contact center solution called Flex on March 12 — lo and behold, today is March 12 and Twilio today announced the launch of Flex at the Enterprise Connect conference in ...